


rose-red youth; rose-white boyhood

by cirrus (themorninglark)



Series: SASO 2017 [28]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Challenge: Sports Anime Shipping Olympics | SASO 2017, M/M, Selfcest, shades of Dorian Gray
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 16:04:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11581449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/cirrus
Summary: He came home, balled up all his tears into a reddened fist and pressed them into the wall, rested his head against that photograph, so tenderly he thought he felt those parted lips graze his cheek.





	rose-red youth; rose-white boyhood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SASO 2017 Bonus Round 4: Quotes | [originally posted here](http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/23665.html?thread=14608241#cmt14608241)  
> Title: my favourite quote from _The Picture of Dorian Gray_
> 
> “Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable — your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers — and pretend they’re across the room.”  
> ― Richard Siken

It was not raining on the day that he stepped out of the photograph.  
  
Years later, Oikawa Tooru would look back and dream that it had been; that a storm had battered at his windows and shaken the panes of fragile glass, and the lightning had kissed the sky just as he had kissed him, electric.   
  
The truth, lost to a temperate summer night, was a lot more prosaic, but it wouldn’t be the first thing he’d rewritten.

 

/

 

He woke up one day with the bruise on his face gone, and the stinging pain in between his eyes a dull throb, the memory of it hurting more than the sensation itself. Slowly, he raised a hand to his face and touched the bridge of his nose. When he swung himself out of bed, his knees flexed with an ease that he hadn’t felt in months.  
  
It was almost as if he  _hadn’t_  thrown himself to the ground for a receive yesterday, misjudged every angle and hit the floorboards with a whip-crack sound that echoed in his head. It was almost as if—  
  
Fingers on his mouth, he trapped his gasp on the tip of his tongue, held on to this breath. He was not sure whose it was, exactly. It was sweet like honey and milk.  
  
Across the room, the photograph he’d pasted on his bare walls with an old piece of tape was curling at the corners, the edges darkening.

 

/

 

His mother had taken this photo at the last Nationals, from the front row of the stands. In it, Oikawa stood with his back half-turned to the audience. The spotlights caught his face in sharp relief, shadows under his eyes and in the tilt of his neck, his lips half-parted. It could have been a laugh, or a sigh, about to slip through them; it could have been a snappy retort to something Iwaizumi said, or a taunt to their opponents. There was no way to tell, now.  
  
She’d given it to him because she had other shots of him in graceful action, one arm thrown back, ball in the air. She had other shots of him with his team and a victory sign at his fingertips. This one was a spare that did not fit in the album.  
  
Oikawa could not bear to throw it away, so he stuck it up and thought little more of it.  
  
When he lost the first regionals of his high school career to a school he’d never even heard of in the semi-finals, he came home, balled up all his tears into a reddened fist and pressed them into the wall, rested his head against that photograph, so tenderly he thought he felt those parted lips graze his cheek.

 

/

 

_Sleep, Tooru,_  came the silken whisper at his ear, and he shifted on his pillow, exhaled. The warmth that curled up beside him was an ache that made his whole body tingle from head to toe. He could no more refuse it than he could stop living.  
  
He did not want to stop living. He was hungry for life.   
  
 _You don’t have to bear it alone. I’m always here._  
  
 _You’re always here._  
  
A whirlwind rose from the ashes inside him. He reached inside, breathed it into the mouth that met his own, so beautiful and familiar that every part of him trembled.

 

/

 

In the photograph, the bruises blossomed on pale skin, and the side of Tooru that was turned away from the camera smiled.


End file.
